Davos Newbies

Some friends think I’m too quick to see the absurdity of McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. We’ll see. But it doesn’t take much of a crystal ball to predict the outcome of her speech to the Republican National Convention tonight.

She’ll do a good job. The hall will be utterly ecstatic with enthusiasm and multiple, lengthy ovations. The talking heads on cable will say she exceeded all expectations. The Republican spinmeisters will say the response shows just how canny and clever McCain was to single Palin out.

What none of it will do is erase the completely impulsive decision making behind the choice. It won’t provide any response to Palin’s abhorrent (to my mind) views on teaching creationism, denying the human role in global warming, and opposing abortion in any circumstances. Despite the bloviating about her having more “executive experience” than any of the senators in the race, she’ll still have the thinnest set of credentials of any candidate in the last hundred years. It’s a joke. But none of that will be pointed out by the media guardians tonight.

Yikes. If US Weekly is laying into Sarah Palin, it really is all over bar the shouting. I’ve long held to the political science truism that vice-president picks don’t have much influence on people’s votes, but there are always exceptions.

As many observers are noting, the issue isn’t so much Palin as McCain’s utterly bizarre lack of preparation and judgment. When we select members of my sons’ school’s board of directors, we do more vetting than McCain did. And we certainly make certain that we’ve met the people more than once.

So where does McCain go from here? I wouldn’t be shocked by an announcement in the next week or so that Sarah Palin decided to withdraw her own candidacy because of the “unwarranted intrusions” into her family’s private life. Of course that would throw McCain’s inadequate, impulsive decision into even harsher relief, but one can imagine the spin machine going into action against “Democratic smear campaigns”. And McCain could actually pick someone who was credible.

The great likelihood, of course, is that the Republicans will stumble on with McCain-Palin. Hallelujah.

Blood and Treasure reacts to the reports of Sarah Palin’s membership in the Alaskan Independence Party:

And let’s not forget that the US would be a lot less trouble to everyone else if it split up into small, eccentric countries, each whittling on its own stump. Interesting wars, too.

I’m watching an absurd discussion on Newhour with Jim Lehrer. A supposedly serious question is posed to an Alaskan writer: “What can you tell us about her achievements on the city council and then as mayor?” There was no real answer to that, as might be expected. Sarah Palin was mayor of a small town, and more recently governor of a physically vast state, with very few people and an extremely simple economy based on oil extraction.

When I was involved with Davos some of the invited public figures were presidents or prime ministers of small countries. It rapidly became apparent that rising to the top of the political establishment in, say, Bermuda, is not equivalent to rising to the top of the political establishment in a country of more than 66,000 people (Bermuda’s population). There were highly targeted issues where the Bermudan prime minister might have heft — the re-insurance industry, for example — but outside that it was like meeting the mayor of a smallish town.

Scale counts.

Mark Kleiman:

Could McCain have possibly made a more un-serious choice? Esepcially given his age and health problems? Think about the former Mayor of Wassilia confronting Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. Think about it hard. Now none of this is any reproach to Palin. She is no more responsible for McCain’s choice of her than Incitatus was responsible for the plan of his rider, Caligula, to make him Consul of Rome. This isn’t “shattering the glass ceiling;” this is an insult to all the Republican women who had some actual qualifications for the job, and for that matter to all women: McCain is making a joke of women’s aspiration to high office. McCain’s willingness to put Palin one not-very-reliable heartbeat from the Presidency tells you all you need to know about his fitness for office.

As Kleiman also points out, if Alaska were a county, it would only rank 84th in the country in population.

Obama’s speech.

Yes, I’m being triumphalist.

If anyone was deluded enough to think the post-Bush Republican party was going to change, how about this from the party platform, according to The Washington Post:

In one controversial vote, the platform committee approved a total ban on embryonic stem cell research.

Makes Bush seem open-minded.

I just caught up with this excellent advice from Brad DeLong:

Don’t trust them. Don’t patronize their advertisers. Don’t believe them. Listen, instead, to people with substantive expertise and knowledge trying to convey that knowledge rather than the ignorant trying to score points with their owners, editors, and sources.

I’ve adopted a daily mantra: ignore the noise.

It’s not about the construction going on at the house next door. It’s about the constant drumbeat from so much of the political media. Obama’s too passive. McCain’s a fighter, but a good guy. People won’t vote for the black guy with the funny name (just about all of the foreign media are pounding this drum in particular). Clinton voters will vote for McCain. Bill is seething with resentment and the party is divided.

I stand by my early view that Obama will win this election handily. He has everything in his favor, and as some of the truth about McCain inevitably seeps out — however much the media fawns on him — his share of the vote will continue moving south. I never thought anyone in my lifetime could be a worse president than George W. Bush, but McCain has that potential. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

I’m not advocating living in blissful ignorance, but I do think you have to tune out the noise.

When I saw the announcement, I thought Google’s Power Readers was a good idea. I’d like to know what feeds people are reading. But if you actually look at the feed lists, they are all boring to a fault and incredibly conventional. Either these folk have drastically edited their lists, had them confected by someone that has no clue, or it’s a very sad reflection on their ability to trawl the interwebs.

Ages ago, Dave Winer tried to whip up enthusiasm for the same idea, but he was way, way ahead of his time. Needless to say, it’s far better to be ahead of your time than behind.